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Aspect Chairman Alex Cranberg. (Credit: University of Texas)

On Thursday, publicly traded ShaMaran Petroleum announced that a new well drilled into the Atrush exploration block in the Kurdish region of Iraq was tested at a flowrate of more than 42,000 barrels of oil per day.

This is a colossal well, the likes of which hasn't been seen onshore in the United States in decades. By comparison, most new wells drilled in the Bakken play of North Dakota are lucky to do 1,000 bpd for the first few weeks before quickly falling off.

So who's celebrating -- aside from the Iraqi Kurds, of course, who are set to receive hefty royalties on every barrel recovered?

Well, shares of ShaMaran (TSX Venture:SNM or OMX:SNM) are up 30% today, adding about $100 million to the market cap of the Toronto-listed pipsqueak. But ShaMaran is not the biggest stakeholder in the Atrush finds.

The license for the Atrush block is 80% held by General Exploration Partners (GEP), and 20% by Houston-based Marathon Oil.

GEP is a joint venture, 33.5% owned by ShaMaran Petroleum and 66.5% by Aspect EnergyInternational. That makes Aspect the biggest beneficiary of this find, with a 53% stake in the Atrush block.

Aspect Energy International is a subsidary of Aspect Holdings, which has offices in Austin, Tex. and Denver, Colo. and is controlled by Alex Cranberg.

Cranberg, 57, is best known for
being a member of the University of Texas board of regents. He has been in the oil business for at least 20 years now. But there's not a lot of public information on him. His companies produce oil and gas on the U.S. Gulf Coast as well as in Belize and Hungary. He is said to have a massive library of 3-d seismic data covering 14,000 square miles of the Gulf coast. In 2006 he helped raise $1 billion with Quantum Resources for a fund to invest in producing oil and gas fields. Based on SEC filings, his shares in QR Energy LP appear to be worth more than $300 million. One of Quantum's portfolio investments, a JV with the Ute Indian tribe of Utah called Ute Energy, has filed to go public. In 2008, a joint venture with private equity giant First Reserve, called Aspect Abundant Shale, sold its holdings in the Barnett shale for $170 million.

But this Kurdish field is in a different realm altogether.

Yet this new well, called Atrush-2, is just one in a string of gushers found in northern Iraq in recent years, and it follows on the success of Atrush-1, about a mile and a half away. That discovery well was tested at 6,400 bpd and indicated "pay zones" of more than 300 feet thick.

In an email response to questions from Forbes, Cranberg wrote that he was not surprised by the success of the new Atrush well, and he believes the two wells communicate, that is, they are tapping the same reservoirs. Cranberg declined to give any estimates of the size of this prize, but the presumption by ShaMaran is that they're looking at hundreds of millions of barrels.

How fast can Atrush be brought online? "We expect to be a material part of the 1 million barrels/day output capacity that Minister Ashti has targeted for the end of 2014," wrote Cranberg to Forbes. "We hope to begin longer term production testing over the next 6 months."